julian_craster

I don't think I have ever seen any of the films mentioned.......

Are they really as awful as Matthew Sweet suggests?

(Note: This article has been CENSORED due to its extended length)


From Guardian Unlimited Arts
Friday June 30, 2006

Keep it up, lads!
By Matthew Sweet


It'll never get a season at the NFT, but British erotic cinema offers a surprisingly honest view of postwar life. Matthew Sweet salutes naughty nurses and cheeky chappies

If you want to feel alienated from your native culture; if you want a close encounter with a grimy, sweaty realm of despair and existential angst; if you want to see, as if in a dream, familiar figures from your childhood performing unspeakable acts and uttering unsavoury words, if you want to see the recent past as you will never see it on those late-night four-hour shows in which Paul Ross tells you what Arctic Roll was, then enter the world of British erotic cinema. The world of Naked as Nature Intended, The Wife Swappers, Confessions of a Driving Instructor and The Ups and Downs of a Handyman. You won't, of course, see anything erotic. But you might see postwar Britain as it really was. Or Lynda Bellingham's left nipple.
The history of erotic cinema in Britain is one of grimly unarousing products sold with extravagantly dishonest marketing techniques, of directors and producers putting more energy into swinging the censor than crafting their work, of actors forgetting their scruples and pretending to hump each other under nylon sheets.

In the 1960s, the undisputed king of sex-film ballyhoo was Tony Tenser, a handsome, square-jawed former cinema manager who, in his schooldays, had been officially declared the second-cleverest boy in London's East End. He should have demanded a recount. This country has never produced a greater genius for the public relations stunt. In 1956 Tenser imported an innocuous French romcom called En Effeuillant la Marguerite, retitled it Madame Striptease, and hired a gaggle of strippers to picket the cinema in their tittie-tassels and protest that the film should be banned on the grounds that it would put them out of work. In 1963 he produced a film called The Yellow Teddybears - a dramatisation of a real case in which a group of grammar-school girls was found to have advertised the loss of their virginity by pinning a Robertson's golliwog to their uniform - then ran an ad campaign offering free entry to sixth-formers.

Tenser also exploited inconsistencies in the censorship laws: when a 1958 nudist-camp flick, Isle of Levant, was refused a certificate by the British Board of Film Classification, but passed by the London County Council, he had posters made that declared: "The film that has been refused by the censor" and watched the seats fill up. When it was rejected by councillors in Birmingham, he exhibited the film in a cinema regulated by the more liberal regime in nearby Walsall, and plastered the buses travelling between the city and its satellite town with posters advertising its suppression. It ran for 12 weeks and took a small fortune at the box office.

So who was going to see these pictures? In the early 1960s, the core audience for erotic cinema was a coalition of raincoated heavy-breathers and earnest young people in cableknit sweaters. The Erotic Cinema season at this year's Cambridge film festival revives that linkage of art and sex: it offers Polanski's Belle de Jour and the 1973 Polish film The Beast, rather than the grubbier, exploitative end of things. Forty-odd years ago, Tenser and his colleagues also refused to draw any distinction between the arthouse film and the sex film. His catalogue for 1962 offered Paris Playgirls, The Call Girl Business, Taste of Love and Last Year At Marienbad. Publications such as Continental Cinema Review gave equal space to nudist camp flicks and the latest Kurosawa. And those ground-breaking British social realist films of the 1960s were marketed as if they were sexploitation films. John Schlesinger's A Kind of Loving was sold with a shot of Alan Bates and June Ritchie attempting to eat each other's faces. The poster for Ken Loach's Poor Cow has Carol White removing her skimpies in front of a pack of leering snappers. There's a speech bubble leaping from her mouth: "Look at those creeps - bet they haven't even got films in their cameras. Still a girl's got to earn a living - and a loving." To the publicity department, a Loach film was the same as 1969's School For Sex or The Lustful Vicar from the following year. Tell that to the people who concocted the painfully tasteful marketing campaign for The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

By 1969, the erotic film had become a mass-market phenomenon. More women than men, it was claimed, turned up that year to see The Wife Swappers, the story of a young woman initiated into the pleasures of group sex on G-plan furniture by a fuzzy-chested, gap-toothed seducer played by Larry Taylor - who you'd recognise if you saw him in his Captain Bird's Eye uniform. In 1975, Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver was comfortably outgrossed at the UK box office by Adventures of a Taxi Driver, starring Barry Evans from Mind Your Language.

These films were a long succession of let-downs. Once cinemagoers had handed their over their money, they were rarely provided with the raw thrills offered by the publicity material. But still they kept going back, hoping, perhaps, that this time the promise of something genuinely erotic would be fulfilled.

What now seems most striking about British faux erotica from the 1970s is the way in which misery and angst threaten constantly to displace the erotic. The Adventures of a Plumber's Mate opens with a tracking shot of the hero's dismal bedsit. On the floor there's a half-eaten plate of last night's chicken and chips. A filthy-looking mouse crawls over the plate. In The Playbirds, a soon-to-be-slaughtered glamour model makes the melancholy remark: "My first nude session paid for the abortion." In the final scene of Permissive, the heroine walks calmly from the grubby hotel bathroom in which her former mentor is lying in a tubful of blood. In some territories this film was sold as Suzy Superscrew. A lot of people must have gone home disappointed.

For anyone determined to be aroused by these films, there was also the added distraction that all this moribund sleaze was populated by familiar faces from the light entertainment of the period. Bernie Winters, Jon Pertwee and Lynda Bellingham all did their time in British erotic cinema. Elaine Paige persuaded the producers of Adventures of a Plumber's Mate to drop her name from the poster - since making the film, she had landed a role in Evita. George Baker - Inspector Wexford, your mother's favourite - can be clocked in Intimate Games (1975), showing off his collection of vibrators. Melvyn Hayes, from It Ain't Half Hot, Mum, can be seen attempting to cadge some sperm from the fertile hero of What's Up Superdoc? (1978) by insisting: "It's not for me, it's for my sister." These clips don't get shown on Before They Were Famous.

Respectable talents also made contributions behind the camera. Michael Nyman supplied the score for Keep It Up Downstairs, a film staring Willie Rushton and Mary Millington - some prints of which have interpolated hardcore sequences. (Perhaps that is where Nyman found inspiration for the building, shuddering rhythms of TGV.) Jonathan Demme's first directing gig was on Secrets of a Door-to-Door Salesman - although he soon left and was repleced by Wolf Rilla - using a script co-written by Denis Norden. Justin Cartwright, winner of the Whitbread prize for fiction, failed to take home any gongs for his work behind the camera on Rosie Dixon - Night Nurse (1978), though he did make the only sex film with Arthur Askey in the cast. Some directors tried desperately to show they were deserving of better material: Eskimo Nell (1975) has gags about "the dialectic" and work of Vilgot Sjoman. An Italian sex film of the 1970s ends with its cast breaking off from their fervid coupling by announcing that they're off to see the latest movie by Michael Powell.


Nostalgia has yet to reclaim the British sex film. It is a territory that remains largely uncharted by film historians, unmined by TV schedulers, unexplored by movie buffs. But if they were sufficiently brave to enter its jungle, they'd soon appreciate its unique qualities. These films will never be treated to a revival at the National Film Theatre or a DVD box-set - but they are as eloquent about British sensibility as any work of their period. Their action may unfold in a cinematic fantasy world in which men whose paunches spill over their Y-fronts are engaged in the endless pursuit of anaemic models dragged up as traffic wardens and WPCs. But their scenes, played out in drab suburban streets, Anaglypta-papered bedrooms, chilly apartments and threadbare, beer-slicked strip joints also offer a picture of Britain that seems less meditated, less contrived than images found in better-regarded films. Michael Balcon's Ealing prided itself on "projecting Britain and the British character". So, in their own way, do 1974's The Amorous Milkman and Miss Adventures at Mega Boob Manor, made 13 years later. What they definitely don't do, however, is threaten to produce the slightest tremor of concupiscence in anyone who chooses to spend their time watching them.

penfold

Actually, they're every bit as cringemaking as he suggests....I think he's being unduly kind as suggesting they're anything but a waste of good celluloid. He does have a couple of good points though...about how serious films of the time were similarly marketed, and that grubby and sleazy as they were, these films capture the era as surely as Get Carter or any episode of The Sweeney.

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

DB7

I've got The Wife Swappers kicking around somewhere but still haven't got round to watching it. I'd recommend Simon Sheridan's Keeping the British End Up: Four Decades of Saucy Cinema, excellent and well researched book that charts the genre from beginning to end.

dylan

This is Matthew Sweet's usual tabloid style, twisting facts and with several errors. For starters, Belle de Jour was directed by Bunuel not Polanski, the early 60s social realism films were not marketed as sexploitation films, George Baker was an established star (but down on his luck) etc.

D.

Cheeky Bob

Actually, it wasn't at all uncommon for serious films in the 1960s to be marketed as sexploitation - I remember seeing a gloriously lurid poster for Francois Truffaut's Jules et Jim featuring Jeanne Moreau lying on a bed looking seductive, and the X certificate was almost as prominent as the letters in the title. Thirty years later, it was reissued with a PG certificate and an altogether more tasteful sepia-tinted poster (I saw the two side by side at the venue in question).

Also, Sweet's description of the poster for A Kind of Loving is pretty much spot on - it consists entirely of a steamy clinch and nothing else, and the clear implication is that Bates and Ritchie aren't wearing very much. The distributors also slapped a prominent 'NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN' roundel apparently dangling from June Ritchie's earlobe, and the tagline is "A Kind Of Loving That Knew No Wrong Until It Was Too Late!"

But it's also worth noting that there's an alternative poster also dating from the original release that's much more sedate - the tagline is the same, but there's no age warning, and the image merely features Alan Bates looking longingly at June Ritchie, who has her back to him.

So I suspect, like any half-decent marketers, the distributors did alternative ad campaigns to fit their perceived audience in particular regions.

dylan

The posters for most films in the *pre-permissive age* suggested that you were going to see the stars romping naked in bed or worse. Look at this 1952 poster for Nick Ray's The Lusty Men:

http://www.einsiders.com/reviews/vid...ges/lusty3.jpg

Look at Bob Mitchum's right hand.

D.

julian_craster

The UK trailer for ROOM AT THE TOP (1959) makes much of its 'X' cetificate and implies that is is DARING and BOLD with lots of steamy sex scenes...

Now they screen it uncut on TV weekday afternoons !